The letter that wouldn’t come out of her mouth was R. Amanda Gorman — a Los Angeles twin raised by a single mother — was diagnosed in kindergarten with an auditory processing disorder that left her with a speech impediment, and she especially struggled to pronounce “R” into her college years. On January 20, 2021, at 22, that same mouth delivered “The Hill We Climb” at a presidential inauguration, in front of the whole watching world — the youngest inaugural poet in American history.
Most people handed a speech impediment quietly route around it: fewer speeches, safer words, a life arranged to avoid the sound that betrays them. Gorman treated the obstacle like a training program. She wrote. She recited. And she drilled herself with the most R-packed number she could find — Hamilton‘s “Aaron Burr, Sir” — a tongue-twister full of the very letter she couldn’t say, repeated until she could say it cleanly. The impediment didn’t get accommodated. It got out-trained.
Her own framing of it, printed here because she said it best: “It made me the performer that I am and the storyteller that I strive to be.” The weakness wasn’t despite the art. By her own account, it was the making of it.
Laureate at every level, then the Capitol
The record she stacked on the way to that podium reads like a ladder of firsts. First Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate, in 2014. Then, in 2017, the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate — a title that did not exist until it was created in a world that included her. And then January 20, 2021: the yellow coat, the red headband, and a 22-year-old standing where Robert Frost and Maya Angelou had stood, closing her poem with the lines the country carried home:
“For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
Count the R’s in the career alone — laureate, performer, storyteller — let alone in the poems. The girl who couldn’t say the letter built a life out of saying everything, on the biggest stages in the language. That’s not a story about overcoming a diagnosis. It’s a story about a child deciding that the thing in her way was going to be the thing she trained on — and then training, for sixteen years, until the inauguration of a president needed exactly her voice.
Join the conversation
She drilled herself on “Aaron Burr, Sir” until the R behaved. What was YOUR “R” — the thing you couldn’t do that you trained on instead of hiding? And did Amanda Gorman’s poem find you where you live on January 20, 2021? Tell us below.
Source note: Amanda Gorman’s account — a Los Angeles twin raised by a single mother, diagnosed in kindergarten with an auditory processing disorder that left her with a speech impediment, especially struggling to pronounce the letter “R” into her college years; her training method of writing, reciting and drilling herself with the R-packed Hamilton number “Aaron Burr, Sir” until she could say the letter cleanly; her becoming the first Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate (2014) and, in 2017, the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate; her delivery of “The Hill We Climb” at President Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021, at 22, as the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, closing with “For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it”; and her own framing, “It made me the performer that I am and the storyteller that I strive to be” — is from the Los Angeles Times (via secondary coverage), her CNN interview via The Mighty, and the Harvard Gazette (2018).
